“I tried to talk but my mouth didn’t work. None of me worked at that point, but that didn’t seem to matter to him. Because he stripped completely naked and got on top of me.”
Nessa’s breath hitched and she had to stop talking, squeezing her eyes shut and crossing her arms over herself, as if it were all happening now.
The only other person she’d talked to about this in her current life was John. She sneaked a peek at Marlon now, and he was looking at her in the same heartbroken way that John had.
Nessa cleared her throat and let go of herself. “So, yeah, so I was no virgin. What was weird was that I would have loved to have sex with him. But this was something else. If he’d ever spoken to me before that, or even made eye contact with me, that would have been one thing. But I might as well have been a knothole in a tree, you know?”
Marlon remained silent, but his posture and expression made him look ready to launch out of his chair and track Nathan down.
“I threw up on his letter jacket,” Nessa said, “so he punched me in the face and broke my nose.” She pointed at the bump on the bridge of it.
Marlon flinched.
“So Candy and some other guy finally got the door open. Long story short, Nathan was eighteen, so he was charged with felony rape. He got thirteen years in Chino, and there went his college scholarship. So up until about nine days ago, I thought Nathan was the troll. He was paroled last year. I thought he’d tracked me down and was going to make me pay for ruining his life.”
Marlon sat digesting this story, and Nessa let him process it while she shivered in the air--conditioning and relived past terrors.
What she hadn’t told Marlon was that even after she was sober and married to a man she loved, sex was always hard thanks to that night. Not all the time, but she’d never again know what it was like to have sex without the rape hanging over her bed like an anvil from a fraying rope.
Marlon stood. “More water?”
She nodded and he left the room. Marlon returned with the refilled glasses and handed one to her, then gripped her shoulder. She reached up with her opposite hand and squeezed his, then let him go.
“What made you think . . . he was the troll?” Marlon asked as he sat down.
-“Couple of things,” Nessa said, taking a long drink and setting the glass on the coffee table. “I found some things around my house with BIG on them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The song that was playing while he was raping me was ‘Dead Wrong’ by Notorious B.I.G. He had it on repeat. I guess it was his jam, like all the wannabe homie white boys. I used to love rap, but that was pretty much ruined for me. To this day I can’t listen to Tupac or Biggie because of this guy.”
“You said there were a -couple of things.”
“Right. The other one was that the troll posted a trivia question to my blog. The answer to it was ‘Rosie.’ ”
“And what does that mean?”
“That’s my real name. Well, my nickname. My birth name was Gypsy Rose Lee Gereben. So that’s another thing I haven’t told you, but I’m going to tell you why it’s not my name anymore, which is where I confess the exact nature of my wrongs. But first I’m going to cry for a minute.”
And she did. This was something about Nessa that had always driven John crazy. She never just cried—-she announced her intention beforehand. Marlon rose again and left the room while Nessa sobbed hard. He returned with a box of tissues. He held it out and she pulled several Kleenex out before he sat down again.
Nessa let herself finish while Marlon sat quietly stroking her hair. She blew her nose and took a drink of water.
“Okay,” she said. “Candy also went by a nickname. Only hers was cooler. She chose it, she said, because Candy was the ultimate rock name: ‘Candy Shop’ by 50 Cent. ‘Sex and Candy’ by Marcy Playground.”
“ ‘Candy--O’ by the Cars,” Marlon offered. “ ‘In Candy’s Room’ by Bruce Springsteen . . .”
Nessa let a smile break through her tears. “Right. Anyway, I’ve never known anyone who picked their own nickname and had it stick. But Candy was that kind of person.
“She lived with her grandma because her own mom had abandoned her when she was an infant. When we weren’t out at the Smell, we were at her grandma’s house. She’d seen all the legendary acts in the sixties at the great old clubs like the Troubadour, Whisky A Go Go, and Pandora’s Box. She saw the Doors, the Byrds, Led Zeppelin, and Janis Joplin live. We’d sit and listen to her stories for hours.”
Marlon obviously couldn’t help smiling at this bit. “She sounds great,” he said.
Thinking of Candy’s grandma brought Nessa to tears again. Being around her, Nessa had gotten to see what real maternal love should look like. Thanks to Grandma, and thanks to Candy’s own drive and ambition to be successful and get out of LA, Candy had had top grades and planned to go to college, unlike Nessa, who’d been completely out of control.
“Candy and her grandma kept me grounded,” Nessa said. “Until she had a stroke and died. It was shortly after that I got Candy hooked on heroin too.”